Preheat the oven to 160 degrees (fan assisted) or gas mark 4, and lay your cupcake cases out on however many baking trays you need

Cream sugar, syrup, fat and potato with a wooden spoon (easier to do if the potato’s still warm, though it doesn’t really matter either way)

Add the eggs and beat thoroughly

Fold in the flour and cinnamon, keeping things light and airy

When all the ingredients are fully incorporated, pour the mix into your cupcake cases (to about ¾ full)

Lick the bowl (the batter is AWESOME) – and try not to get salmonella

Bake for 20-25 minutes. If you prick them with a knife and it comes out clean they’re ready to come out

Allow to cool on a wire rack

In the meantime, prepare whatever icing you see fit (I used a simple vanilla buttercream, but would also recommend something of the cream cheese variety – such as the white chocolate frosting in my favourite Chocolate Berry Cake)

Smear it all over the tops of your cupcakes (but not until they’ve cooled right down)

Inspired by the flavours of several new Thorntons offerings – and on sale for a limited time – it certainly isn’t your average menu (unless your local tea room always sells Salmon and Cocoa Sandwiches).

At £33 per person, however (£41 with Champagne), it also isn’t the cheapest of ways to chow down.

What? With Doughnut-Croissant hybrids sparking a feeding frenzy in New York and dampening chins all over the world, it was only a matter of time before someone this side of the Atlantic started selling their own brand.

First major business to get onboard? The omnipresent chain of budget British bakeries, Greggs.

Instead, these balls of dough and glaze are known, somewhat inelegantly, as Greggsnuts.

Their makers describe them as ‘delicious’ and ‘fluffy’, with ‘layer upon layer of soft, light pastry’.

Again, no doubt to avoid litigation, they’re specifically aligned with Yum Yums (that other fried and flaky treat) and claim to have been inspired by the ‘craze’ of Cronuts, rather than Cronuts themselves.

Yeah, right.

Like Cronuts, they are glazed and filled, with two flavours available to buy: Summer Berry and Crème, and Caramel and Pecan.

Like Cronuts, their supply has been deliberately limited: only 13 shops are stocking them – less than one per cent of the company’s 1,671 UK outlets – and these will only sell them in September.

Unlike Cronuts, however, one bite is enough to confirm that they are not a taste sensation.

Don’t get me wrong: they’re not awful. They’re just not awfully good.

While devotees of the Cronut will wax lyrical on its freshness, flakiness and chew, the Greggsnut leaves a lot to be desired.

It is not Croissanty at all – the layers are thick and heavy, and they cloy together, sticking between the teeth.

The fillings are sparse, not gooey, and dwarved by great big pockets of air. And while the Caramel adds a certain salty silkiness (never a bad thing), neither it nor the bodiless Berry Crème pack the filthy, no-holds barred punch that I’d hoped for.

Of course this is hardly surprising. Unlike the original Cronut, these aren’t gourmet products, lovingly made in a tiny batch by a top Pastry Chef and his team.

In fact, they’re more or less what you’d expect from Greggs: sugary, bulky, cheap, and more impressive in looks than taste.

What? I don’t go to fancy joints often, Ogglers, but when I do I expect big things: concepts I can’t find in other places; flavours to blow my mind.

So when I saw ‘Rice Pudding Brûlée with Prunes and Armagnac’ on the menu of the lavish Bob Bob Ricard, I found myself rubbing my trotters with glee.

Here was something I’d never envisaged before, let alone put in my mouth – and the consequences of it could be great.

Just imagine what else might benefit from a cheeky little booster of Brûlée: Ice Cream; Yoghurt; a boring old piece of bread. All at once there was a whole new genre of desserts, just waiting to be discovered.

For the moment, however, the idea of it crowning a creamy bowl of Rice was far and away the most promising: I pictured a gooey, Vanilla pudding, sealed with a decadent Caramel crust, brought to life with a shimmer of booze and the odd rich pruney glob.

I could hardly wait to try it.

But, alas, reality refused to deliver.

What arrived was not a dish with a glowing top, or anything I could crack with the back of a spoon. In fact, the dessert that B.B.R. had created was not brûléed at all: instead it was a bowl of Rice with a lattice of hard Caramel resting lightly across the top.

Perhaps I should report them for mislabelling. As we all know, ‘brûlée’ – from the French for ‘burnt’ – is a process involving a blow torch and thick drifts of sugar. The resulting glaze is part of the pudding – not something which can be lifted and left to one side.

Such definitions are important. Otherwise, what’s to stop anyone wearing a Caramel lattice hat, then selling themselves as a ‘Brûlée’ too?

False labels and fakeness aside, the taste of the thing was also a letdown.

Essentially, it was flavourless: I could see Vanilla Pods but couldn’t taste them; my Prunes were not punchy or boozy. They barely registered. And although the Rice was pleasant and silky enough, the whole combination was sadly sub-par.

It’s not as if they don’t know how to make decent Brûlées at that place – The Man ordered a trio of them, all perfectly formed, which were worth a small round of applause.

But for flavourful Rice-based puddings, take my advice: go elsewhere, or make your own.

What? Salmiak – or Ammonium Chloride – is something you don’t often see in England (specialist shops aside). In Sweden, however, the flavour’s all over the place.

A type of salted Liquorice, it often crops up as a filling in various Chocolate Bars, and you might well assume that something so widespread would be reasonably tame. After all, if most people eat it, how weird can it be?

In a word: that s*** CRAY.

Take Center, a product made by Cloetta – a ‘leading confectionery company in the Nordic region’.

As Chocolate goes, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more intense.

Imagine a packet of Rolos on drugs: harmless soft Caramel fillings that have mutated into mouth-watering punches of salt, sweet and acid.

POW.

Ma Hog and I shared a packet between us – enraptured at first (‘It’s a taste SENSATION!’), then gradually overwhelmed by the strength of the flavour. By the time we were nearing the end, both of us found it a struggle to go on: we had found the Rolo’s antithesis.

‘You take the last one,’ I begged her.

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘You.’

I suppose we shouldn’t have been so surprised: we were eating Ammonium Chloride, for crying out loud; a chemical used in galvanising, found on coal dumps and volcanic vents.

I guess that explains why it felt like my taste buds were burning…

Where? You can buy Salmiak Chocolate in most supermarkets/newsagents in Sweden. Just don’t eat the whole pack alone

What? The Hagabulle is an enormous Haga-café-based Swedish-style Cinnamon Roll – a mouthful in more ways than one.

In the likely event that you don’t get the scale from the photo above, find a dinner plate, roll a tea towel into a spiral, and lay it on the top as if it’s Pastry. Even then it’ll be smaller than what I vainly attempted to eat with Ma Hog.

You can find these giant Kanelbullar (a.k.a. Cinnamon Rolls) in various parts of town – but the bad boys from Café Husaren are apparently among the best-loved.

Though the faint taste of Cardamom makes for a fragrant bite, the Hagabulle is disappointingly dry: it needs more Cinnamon goo to make the grade. Indeed, the paste was all too scanty – plainly no match for the acres of flaky bread it was holding together.

Replacing the hard sugar lumps with icing would also have done the trick – or warming it up and dunking the whole thing in coffee or tea.

As it was, with only a glass full of water to help me along, I found it a tough task indeed. As did Ma Hog.

What? The bizarrest-sounding combo I have seen this year – and, strangely, one of the nicest.

I should explain: though a die-hard lover of vegetables, I’m not generally keen on the drinking variety (a revolting glass of Beetroot Smoothie saw to that one day in India). This creation from M&S, though, I can dig.

For starters, the colour is amazing – the kind of green you’d expect from a glass of juiced Braeburns, but would never get.

And while it doesn’t smell particularly appetising (neither on the way in or way out), I assure you the taste is quite superb.

Not one of the three main ingredients masks the others, creating an overall effect that is zingy – like sherbert – and thankfully not too sweet.

Collectively, it tastes like a whole new fruit – more citrussy than anything – and is so darn healthy it apparently counts as two of your five-a-day.